How we can stop Mitch McConnell

I know, the sexy thing to focus on, is the scandal of Junior’s corruption and Kushner’s collusion, but since I had already assumed both were as thoroughly corrupt as their father/in-law, nothing is surprising me, and most of the journalistic digging seems a distraction from Congressional activities. Albeit necessary: kudos to them all.

But for now, I am more focused on the affairs of the United States than the state of affairs in the Trump family by their treasonous goings-on. Rather than the Don/s, I have more to say about the Mitch, who is holding the fate of the health of the nation in his grasping hand.

I find it consoling to know that before 1984, when McConnell gained the Kentucky senatorial seat he still holds, Kentucky was a staunch Democratic State. Let’s set aside for a moment the complications of what kind of Democratic State it was that could let slip the senatorial seat from Walter Huddleston to Mitch McConnell, and focus on the fact that the chinless wonder won the seat because for at least fourteen years he had raised a whole lot of money by hobnobbing and selling his oyster soul to the DeVos (see my article on Dark Money). That first time, he won by a margin of just over 5000 votes. His majority has only multiplied since then, with the multiplying prowess of his fund raising: twenty years after that slender majority, he won by over 100,000 votes in 2014.

Should we therefore dismiss Kentuckians from the cohort of sensible voters exercising their enlightened self-interest at the polls in voting for senators every six years, especially since Paul Rand is the other Senator? (I actually have nothing much against Paul Rand, whose principles I don’t share, but who I think is acting mostly from principle, and who at the moment is saving us all from the cruel bill being pushed by his fellow Kentuckian.) Should we despair?

No, we should not, because there are a lot of people in Kentucky: almost 4.5 million of them. And fewer than 2 million voted in 2016. I don’t know what exercise in voter suppression the super-wealthy are encouraging and funding in this mainly white, mainly minority-free state, but I do know that education is at a premium (most people have not gone beyond high school). I do know that many of the 500,000 who signed up for the State health exchange Kinect, did not connect the program that gave them health coverage for the first time in their lives, with the expansion of Medicaid that was a consequence of the death-panel-generating-Obama-care-ACA.

Only one Kentuckian congressional seat is Democratic in 2017: in 2018, there is the chance to turn the tables and give FIVE to those truly interested in governing. For 2020, Kentucky people with determination, ambition and decent principles, may want to labor to oust the oyster and his carpetbagger enablers. Or else the septuagenarian senator will be embalmed in office, side by side with a triumphant autocrat: Ivanka, anyone?